


and i got ready for the future to arrive

by spacenarwhal



Category: Gossip Girl
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Death, Depression, F/M, Female Characters Deserve Better, Fix-It, Gen, Injury Recovery, Male-Female Friendship, Miscarriage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-12
Updated: 2018-11-12
Packaged: 2019-08-22 11:23:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16596950
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacenarwhal/pseuds/spacenarwhal
Summary: Nowadays it feels like the world’s been rewritten in a language Blair never bothered to learn despite all her meticulous preparations, who can say what might be true.[Or: Chuck dies in the accident, Blair leaves Manhattan, and gets a chance at living her own life.]





	and i got ready for the future to arrive

**Author's Note:**

> Listen, I know the last episode of gossip girl aired six years ago and I know that I stopped watching it at least a year before that. But this was an idea that never left me and I've been working on this fic on and off for nearly six years because I so wanted Blair to have more than the show gave her. So this takes an AU turn after 5x10 and just sort of rambles from there. 
> 
> Title from Woke Up New by the Mountain Goats.

She decides to stay with her father. Her mother and Cyrus stay for a week, then two, but even Eleanor Waldorf cannot keep the hounds of business at bay forever, not even for her daughter. When she goes she leaves Blair, still yellowed with bruises, behind. Blair can’t say she’s not used to it.

 

-

 

Roman brings tea in the early afternoon. Sometimes he sits with Blair, talks about her father and plans for the new season, chatters nonthreateningly about the weather. 

 

Her father strokes her hair and kisses her tender forehead—sixteen stitches arched like a sickle swung down from her hairline. Blair shudders to think of the scarring—and tells her it’s going to be alright.

 

There is a part of Blair that wants to give in to the dramatic tendencies that run deep in her still. She wants to scream that it won’t, not ever, because Chuck Bass is dead. And how Blair is still breathing, it shouldn’t be possible. She remembers being seventeen and eighteen, nineteen, twenty, being sure to the center of her body that she would never be able to breath, not outside Manhattan, not without Chuck, but the truth is that  _ she is _ , still breathing, minute by minute. 

 

The world keeps turning on its axis when she wishes it crumble into ruins like everything else, but it doesn’t. Blair feels like she’s been left powerless. Like maybe she always has been.

 

Nowadays it feels like the world’s been rewritten in a language Blair never bothered to learn despite all her meticulous preparations, who can say what might be true.

 

-

 

The wedding was cancelled while Blair was still in the hospital and the engagement was called off indefinitely the day before they put Chuck in the ground and Louis left seven hours before Blair got on a private plane to France. 

 

There are divorces on the Upper East Side that aren’t handled as neatly and efficiently as the termination of Blair’s fairytale. 

 

-

 

Blair remembers being seventeen, hiding from the world in her silk dressing gown. She could always appreciate the theatricality of distress. Her and Chuck thrived on it, consummate performers playing their parts on an elaborate stage, New York City their backdrop. 

 

Her father’s new home is quieter than all that, it makes the world feel small in a way that make the connectivity of gossip blast and social networks and constant socializing seem false. She sleeps a lot. She mostly has medication to thank for that. Her fingers are still ugly and useless, taped together and stiff, but Roman helps her remove the last chipped vestiges of her nail polish with gentle dabs of cotton wool. He tells her he knows a great spa, when she’s ready. The servants smile politely and ask if she requires anything but don’t sit with her in the parlor as sounding boards for her latest scheme.

 

Some days she gets the urge to make a cross-Atlantic call, misses Dorota with startling urgency whenever she’s met with a courteous nod on the days when she doesn’t want to get out of bed. Blair doesn’t picks up the phone. 

 

Her contact with New York is irregular at best. Nate Archibald surprises her by emailing her incessantly, reminds her there was more between them than the flimsy golden veneer of legacy. He sends her updates on the city, on his life, one their friends. Blair wonders if he still keeps to the penthouse over the Empire, if he boxed Chuck’s things or hired someone to do it, if he’s moved on, maybe to that wide, white apartment he tried to tempt her with once. Nate doesn’t say. Blair doesn’t ask. 

 

He tells her about a girl he meets, and the one he meets after, and the one who comes after and she almost cracks a smile at his endless pursuit for the perfect love. It’s a wonder he doesn’t cross paths with Serena more often. 

 

He doesn’t ask how she is because she never responds, but he tells her he hopes she’s doing well. He tells her that the city isn’t the same without Blair Waldorf. She doubts that but she still appreciates the sentiment. 

 

-

 

She wasn’t supposed to attend the funeral—doctor’s orders and her family’s requests—but she’s Blair Waldorf. Requests and orders are for other people to follow.

 

She’s Blair Waldorf and he was Chuck Bass and for a fleeting second they were everything she used to believe she always knew they would be. She couldn’t not be there. 

 

They buried him next to his father. She can’t help thinking how much he would have hated that.

 

-

 

Serena calls, yawns into the phone because their hours don’t match and Blair doesn’t bother to work out the time difference. “I can go.” She still offers, like she did when Blair first told her she was going to stay with her father for a while and Blaire looks down at the steaming cup of tea left at her elbow. She picked this particular set herself (pink posies on white china) the first time she visited but now it reminds her about the wedding china all returned and the custom-made nursery set her mother had ordered and the new plot of dirt in an Upper East Side cemetery. 

 

“B?” Serena says, voice soft with concern and so familiar Blair can almost see her, blue eyes wounded, pink mouth heavy with sadness, and Blair shakes her head mutely. “No,” she says finally, relocates her voice and puts it to use, “You don’t have to do that. I’m alright.” 

 

Lying has always come easy between the two of them. It might be the one constant of their friendship.

 

-

 

The doctor untapes her fingers and the stitches come out of her forehead and her prescription pain medication is reduced to nothing. The bruises fade and the scabs peel off and all Blair has to show for it is the faint line let behind where the stitches used to be. Nothing careful application of foundation won’t hide. 

 

The doctor asks about other ailments, asks if she’s sleeping, if she’s eating; if she’s having a hard time adjusting to—

 

She asks him if there’s anything he can prescribe for the stretch marks that haven’t faded from her hips, brown-red and crooked, like the angry scribbles of a toddler, and refuses to feel bad for doing it.

 

-

 

February comes and goes without fanfare. She spends the fourteenth in her room after urging her father to take Roman out. Her mattress sighs beneath her; the blankets heavy and warm over her body, her toes are cold. She thinks about putting a movie on. Humphrey sends her files sometimes, writes mini-synopses and paragraph long reviews about why he thinks she’ll like the movie. She’s started a few but can’t find the focus to pay attention, falls asleep or simply zones out, comes back to herself when the credits are rolling. 

 

She thinks about it long enough to drift to sleep still considering the option, wakes up feeling disoriented and heavy-headed. 

 

She dreamt of New York City and Manhattan’s lights, the Met steps and Serena’s golden hair swinging wild behind her as she ran out onto the street to hail a cab. Blair tried to follow, but her shoes pinched and her feet slipped inside them, her belly swollen and so heavy beneath her white blouse. When she tripped—her ankle almost hurts with the memory of it turning—no one stopped to help her up. 

 

-

 

Her mother visits in April. She touches Blair’s hair and kisses her cheek; Cyrus hugs her hard, squeezes her so close Blair aches. She remembers when family gatherings were ordeals to endure, but now everyone is on their best behavior, Roman and her mother chatting amicably about the Spring runways, her father and Cyrus conversing about the proper way to prepare a roast. Blair listens to their conversations, wanders between them. It’s nice.

 

Cyrus tells her that Dorota has had her baby, shows her a picture of a red-faced infant with dark eyes on he took on his phone. 

 

That night she picks up the phone. Dorota doesn’t answer but Blair leaves a message. “Congratulations.” She says, putting as much happiness into her voice as she can. “He’s beautiful.” 

 

She means it.

 

-

 

She wasn’t ready to be a mother. She knows that. 

 

But if she had to be one—and isn’t that everything you need to know, how much it felt like an obligation, like a responsibility she couldn’t skirt—she knows she could have done it. Her life has always been hers to make what she wants of it. She could have married Louis or run away with Chuck and had a baby and it would have been whatever she chose. 

 

(Choice has always been the most prized illusion of Blair’s life.)

 

“I’m not sad—” She tells her therapist one day, smoothing her skirt over her lap. Sad is such a small word it feels inconsequential compared to the gnawing feeling that still sometimes rises up inside her when she thinks about it too long. “I am, that it happened but I’m also—“ She bites her lip, unsure of the word on the lip of her tongue. Blair’s not new to judgement, but she’s not used to this level of honesty with herself. “Sometimes I’m relieved.”

 

Blair Waldorf has never been under the delusion of being a good person. The world is not run by nice people. Control and power require a degree of ruthlessness she has never been afraid of, a level of cruelty Blair’s has even enjoyed from time to time when applied to those that have wronged her. 

 

She wasn’t ready to be a mother and she wasn’t ready to be a wife and she wasn’t ready—and now she doesn’t have to worry about any of it and the relief she feels sometimes is as overwhelming as the dread that used to keep her up at night. 

 

Sometimes she thinks losing Chuck was a punishment; that God took him because Blair was so close to having what she wanted. Sometimes she thinks losing Chuck was like severing the last string of obligation tying Blair to a life she wasn’t sure she wanted any more. 

 

Without him (without Louis, without a ring on her finger, without a child) the future feels limitless in a way it hasn’t in years, no neatly laid plan for her to execute. 

 

Her therapist stares back at her, her expression so neutral and nonplussed it makes Blair want to snap. She folds her hands over her lap instead. 

 

-

 

“When are you coming home B?” Serena asks over the phone, the edges of her voice clipped. “There’s some stuff going down that I could really use your help on. You know I wouldn’t bring it up if it wasn’t important.” (Nate had mentioned something about Gossip Girl in his last email. Blair hadn’t looked too closely, skimming over it in favor of Nate’s latest foray into the dating scene.)

 

Blair wiggles down in to her blankets, the blinds pulled shut, movie streaming on the television. It’s one of Humphrey’s latest suggestions, something Dutch and incomprehensible. “I’m not sure.” She says honestly, because they’ve both been left waiting too many times. “I—I’m sorry.”

 

Serena sighs. “I miss you B.” 

 

Blair closes her eyes, resists the lifelong urge that compels her to go when Serena calls. “I miss you too S.” 

 

-

 

It’s on a rainy day in late April that Blair makes a decision. She hasn’t made enough of them of late, but there’s another email from Nate open on her computer with details about a cater waiter he’s been trying to woo and a footnote about how Humphrey might be getting a book published and Serena taking on a column, her very own personalized response to Gossip Girl and Blair decides it’s time for a change. The world’s carried on without her--without Chuck Bass--and it’s time for Blair to carry on too. 

  
  


Blair is twenty-one, a college drop out, an almost princess, a not-quite-widow, a mother to a child that was never born. 

 

And even if all that’s true, she’s still Blair Waldorf. The name doesn’t mean what it used to, certainly not what she used to think it  _ had  _ to mean.

 

And maybe it doesn’t mean anything but Blair knows she means something. 

 

For the first time in her life Blair feels like there’s time to figure out what. 

 

-

 

“I applied to Université d'Aix-Marseille.” She tells everyone at the dinner table. It brings conversation to a halt, her mother’s glass of red paused at her lips. When she lowers it there’s lipstick smudged along the rim and just barely on her chin. Cyrus stares at Blair and then at her mother and then cracks into his usual boisterous laughter. “Why, that’s wonderful!”

 

Her father blinks, seemingly startled into silence, clearing his throat before saying mildly, “Is that what you’ve been working on so diligently these last few weeks?”

 

Blair reaches for her own wine glass, takes a dainty sip. “I missed the deadline for the Fall but the counselor I spoke with assured me I could still be admitted for the Spring semester.”

 

“You’d stay in France then.” Her mother says, wiping at the corner of her mouth with a cloth napkin.

 

Blair nods, carefully sets her glass down. “Yes. I would--I’d move to Marseille obviously, otherwise the commute would be terrible,” Cyrus chuckles at her weak joke. Blair’s heart burst with affection for her step-father. “I know it isn’t Yale but I could actually graduate this time.” She sneaks a glance at her father, wishes she could shoulder the fear she feels weighing her down when she meets his eye. 

 

Dad smiles at her, his pumpkin pie smile, reaches out towards her and rubs her arm. “If that’s what you want, then it’s wonderful. Though I admit, I’ll admit I’ll miss having you here.”

 

“Thank you for letting me stay.” 

 

Roman tsk under his breath. “This is your home Blair. You’re always welcome.”

 

-

 

The Upper East Side is empty with most of the natives gone to the Hamptons to enjoy the last days of summer, fleeing the way birds flock to warmer climates in the winter. 

 

Blair doesn’t mind the solitude, spends most of her days packing her things with Dorota’s help, sorting it into piles. Things to take. Things to give away. The latter grows quickly, shoes and purses and dresses, things she once thought important to have. They don’t seem to matter as much anymore. She already knows she can live without them. 

 

She has lunch with Nate in the dining room. They talk about his latest girlfriend, a pretty blonde theatre girl who moonlights as a waitress to pay her way through school. “She’s playing Hamlet,” Nate says, besotted, proud, and Blair sees the charming, sweet boy she loved as a girl, “You should come with me to a show.” 

 

Blair goes, feels out of place as soon as she follows Nate into the dimly lit basement masquerading as a playhouse. Blair can still hear the footsteps of the pizza parlor patrons overhead, but Nate’s already introducing her to people he apparently knows by name. “This is my friend, Blair.” He says, one warm hand at Blair’s elbow, a sign of support more than an attempt to rein her in Blair realizes, and she relaxes, offers a polite smile and her hand. She loses track of the strangers, a Sarah here, a Thomas there, their faces all blur together under the watery yellow light bulbs. If anyone recognizes her from gossip blasts or tabloids, no one lets on. 

 

Nate beams when he introduces her to a girl playing the titular role of the night, her hair braided into a tight crown around her head, her blue eyes thickly lined with black khol. “Lola this is Blair.” Nate says, and Lola’s dark brows hike up, her pink lips quirk into a grin. “Thank you for coming.” Lola says and there’s something familiar to the blue eyes, but Blair can’t place it before it’s time for them to take their seats. It’s been months since Blair’s been around so many people, nevermind peers her own age, but it’s almost easy here, sitting in the near dark of the tiny theatre with no one’s eyes on her. 

 

The play isn’t the worst adaptation of Shakespeare Blair’s ever witnessed and she tells Nate as much while they push their way backstage. Nate studies her, bright eyes surprisingly sharp as he looks at her face, his hand reaches out and takes hers. It’s always been easy to underestimate him, Blair thinks, feeling flushed, feeling guilty, but Nate just squeezes her hand. “I’m glad you’re here, Blair.” He takes her by surprise, kisses the top of her head. 

 

Blair excuses herself from the after party with the cast and stage crew, lets Nate walk her to a cab and pay her fare. 

 

“Breakfast tomorrow?” He asks, leaning into the window. 

 

Blair nods, “Okay. Nine?”

 

Nate laughs, “Ten.” 

 

-

 

Dan Humphrey shows up with a bouquet of purple ranunculuses wrapped in brown paper he probably picked up at some free trade florist in DUMBO. His hair is ridiculous and his shirt is wrinkled, the v-neckline showing where his tan ends and the beginnings of chest hair. He’s sweating, and the tops of the flowers are a little sunscorched. 

 

“Nate said you were back.” He says, before clearing his throat. He seems at a loss and Blair kind of likes it. The Dan Humphrey in her mind never seems to shut up.  “I’d ask how you’re doing but it seems like a stupid question given the givens.” He shrugs. 

 

“Given the givens.” She says by way of agreement, tugs the sleeve of her thin knit sweater down her arm. She resists the urge to touch her forehead, knows she’ll just smudge her concealer if she does. She motions for Dan to follow her into the kitchen, takes a seat on one of the stools and then tells him when he can find a vase. He almost grins at that, follows her directions and pulls down a simple crystal vase that undoubtedly costs more than the flowers Dan means to place in it.  

 

“You didn’t visit me in the hospital.” She says, because there’s never been a reason to be tactful in her world. Especially not with him. She didn’t plan on saying it, didn’t realize she’d been holding on to it until now, watching his back.

 

“I-uh-once, but once I was there-uh-” the brown paper crinkles in his hands as he wrenches the flowers free. “—I thought you—um, could use a little space.” She remembers him leading her into a room where Chuck was waiting, how he told them to go. Blair wonders. She’s sick of wondering. 

 

“You’re doing that wrong.” She says when he starts to arrange the flowers and his shoulders fall out of their rigid line, just a little, when he tells her she can do it if she’d like to. 

“I’m sorry.” Dan says after a few minutes of silently watching Blair snip the ends of flowers so that the stems are the appropriate height. Blair wonders whether he’s apologizing for not seeing her at the hospital or for the broken engagement or for the baby Blair doesn’t think about as often as she should or for the death of Chuck Bass. 

 

“I’m alright.” Blair answers after a second, letting the words linger in the air, savoring them. They taste like truth. 

 

-

 

Humphrey stays and they watch something British with a laugh track that he swears is genius though Blair can’t quite catch the rhythm of the jokes. Nate joins them later, brings pizza and beer and the three of them gorge themselves right in the living room, Blair barefoot and scolding them not to get oil on her couch. 

 

(Roman and her had finally gone to that spa he’d mentioned, had gotten pedicures and manicures while Roman asked Blair questions about what she was planning on studying. “Fashion runs in your family.” He’d teased and Blair had bitten her lip, watching the water swirl around her ankles as her feet soaked. She remembers running herself ragged juggling an internship and school, trying to make her name outside her mother’s shadow while never shrugging the weight of it off her shoulders. She was going to be a princess, she thought mildly, but there was never any sting to that thought. No longing left in her. That dream had lost it’s glimmer long ago. “I’m not sure yet.” She answered honestly. Roman smiled. “You’ll figure it out then. That’s half the fun of college, you know. Figuring yourself out.”)

 

She falls asleep against the arm of the couch, wakes with a crick in her neck and an cashmere throw tangled around her legs, Humphrey’s hand on her knee and Nate’s palm cupping the heel of her foot. Blair worries about grease stains, eyes slit open momentarily to look at them both, but their eyes are on the television, watching a soccer match with the volume muted. Blair sighs, closes her eyes and doesn’t worry about anything else. 

 

-

 

Humphrey assembles boxes and Nate, unsurprisingly, is hopeless at folding anything so Blair relegates him fetching things off the highest shelves. Humphrey critiques Blair’s choice of music and Nate traitorously tells him about Blair’s brief adolescent obsession with top forty boy bands. 

 

Neither of them ask Blair if she’s sure this is what she wants to do, neither of them tell her that Manhattan is where she belongs. Blair aches with it, but it’s a clean ache, like stitches being pulled loose, the skin mended underneath. 

 

The room empties quickly with all of them working, until it seems to be more boxes than room. Dorota comes with trays of sparkling water and light snacks, eyes still red and puffy, like they’ve been since Blair made clear the purpose of her visit. Her mother has no intention of letting Dorota go, but Blair knows it’s not job security that has her in this state. It’s enough to make her own throat tighten but there isn’t time for it, not now, so Blair thanks her and sets one of the trays down on her emptied desk. (The paternity results were thrown away months and months ago, but Blair can still feel the paper clutched between her fingers.)

 

That night Nate takes them out to dinner at some lounge trying to pass as a dive bar, and Blair listens to Nate and Humphrey talk about nothing in particular, a soccer match, a book, a movie. 

 

They’re not the reminiscent type. 

 

It’s nice, having room to think about the future.  

 

-

 

Blair packs her jewelry herself. She gives a lot of it to Dorota to do with as she pleases. She doesn’t foresee herself needing much of it at school. She doubts she’ll be featured in any gossip blasts. She doesn’t need to present the perfect public image. 

 

The Erickson Beamer necklace she sets in a velveteen box, wraps it in tissue paper and packs in a box of things she means to keep. She never wore it as often as she’d wanted to, a secret she had to keep for a long time, and then there were other gifts, shiny baubles, conspicuous and heavy at her throat. The diamond ring Louis gave her would have clashed with it, she knows, and wearing it now would feel like donning a widow’s veil. 

 

She keeps it and wants to remember all the good times, the softness of Chuck’s face in sleep, the way he told her that he loved her, the way the words had sounded in those quiet mornings, few though they were, when they weren’t wrapped in all their armor, just two people in love. 

 

She wishes she could wrap those memories in velvet, keep them safe in tissue paper, they were so far and few between. 

 

-

 

Serena comes last. Blair doesn’t know that she’s surprised to see her, waiting for her at the bottom of the stairs. She’s sunkissed, bronzed from head to toe, wearing a white sundress and brown sandals, her hair a messy braid hung over her shoulder. She looks radiant, like summer embodied in a single person, and Blair’s eyes sting just to look at her. Serena always casted the biggest shadows, the ones Blair couldn’t escape. 

 

“You didn’t say you were coming home.” Serena says instead of hello, and there’s hurt in her voice, in the downward turn of her lovely, pink mouth.

 

“I didn’t mean to stay this long.” Blair answers. She really hadn’t. Two, three days max, but now it’s been nearly a week and Blair hasn’t booked a return flight yet. She just knows she’s going to. This is a prolonged goodbye, stretched out because Blair’s realized she hasn’t lost everything she thought she had. Manhattan holds more than ghosts. 

 

Serena makes a frustrated sound, toys with the end of her braid. “I had to learn from Gossip Girl you were in New York.”

 

Blair’s face heats. Her skin crawls to think of her picture, her name, being used on that site, by whoever it is that runs it. She can hear the screech of tires, the wail of sirens, flashing lights through tinted windows. She doesn’t know how she remembers how to breathe. But she does. Blair breathes. 

 

“I wasn’t hiding.” Blair says, impatient, uneasy in a way she hates most. Serena’s always been best at this, at cutting through every defense Blair’s ever been able to build around herself, at picking her bones clean. 

 

“ _ Obviously _ . You seemed to be having a great time with Nate and Dan.” Betrayal flashes across Serena’s face. “I’m supposed to be your best friend, B.”

 

Blair takes another deep breath, lets it fill her lungs. Her own perfume clashes with the scent coming off Serena’s skin, patchuli and lavender and cedarwood, something earthy and rich. It sticks in Blair’s throat. 

 

She wants to open her mouth and tell Serena how hard it was, those first few weeks, how she thought, wished, it was as simple as sinking into a bed, in the dark, to disappear and never be thought of again. 

 

After a lifetime striving for immortality, Blair’s greatest wish was to be forgotten, because fame and attention had cost her everything. Chuck’s life. A child’s life. The fairytale life Blair had always thought she wanted. 

 

She wants to open her mouth and tell Serena how she felt numb, not just after the accident, but before it, how she’d lay in bed with a hand pressed to her belly and her stomach rolling with nausea that reminded Blair so much of sinking to her knees in front of the toilet, a perfectly manicured nail reaching for the back of her throat in the effort to lose another pound. She wants to tell her how the ring on her finger was heavier than any diamond had a right to be, how her life was closing in on her like a cage and she wasn’t even twenty-three yet. How all the doors felt closed when she’d always been told she could have anything. 

 

She wants to tell Serena how much of her life has felt like a competition, against Serena, against herself. How she loved Louis as much as she hated the idea of marrying him, how she hated Chuck as much as missed him, misses him, how she was afraid she would hate the baby she carried as much as she hated everything and everyone else she’s ever loved. 

 

Blair doesn’t know if she’s ever loved anyone without hating them a little. She doesn’t know if that’s what love is supposed to be. But it’s all she’s ever known. 

 

“And you’re supposed to be mine.” Blair answers, and it isn’t enough. It isn’t enough. Not anymore.

 

-

 

Nate and Humphrey take her to the airport, ignore Blair’s insistent reminders that she could just as easily hire a town car to take her. Her boxes have all be picked up and shipped out to Dad’s house and Blair knows that the rest of the summer will be sent organizing what she’s sent, getting ready for the following spring. She thinks of taking a course online, just to catch up, get her mind back into the swing of academics. 

 

Nate insists on playing the gentleman, carries her carry-on on his shoulder while Blair checks herself in. 

Afterward they walk to all the way to the security gates, staring at each other awkwardly while people with overstuffed rolling suitcases wheel by. “Don’t be a stranger,” Nate says, pulling Blaire into a hug with both arms. Blair sniffs a little, inhales the faint scent of weed Nate’s carried with him since he was fourteen. It’s comforting, in its own weird way.

 

She doesn’t know whether or not to hug Humphrey, their friendship has always oscillated between hot and cold, but at the last moment he surprises her, slinging an arm over her shoulders. She rests her forehead against his shoulder, the soft thin fabric of his t-shirt, remembers falling asleep on his shoulder in that loft. He’s been her friend. One day she’ll make sure to tell him she doesn’t blame him for anything that’s happened. “Those French kids aren’t going to know what hit them.” Dan says, like he’s someone’s little league coach, and Blair wrinkles her nose to keep him from ruffling her hair. 

 

“She’ll come around.” Nate says, and Blair sobers, nods. She doesn’t know if that’s true or not. She loves Serena, will always love Serena, and knows Serena loves her, but the word love has always been as brittle as it is steel between them. Blair doesn’t know that there’s any way of going back to who and what they used to be, doesn’t know if that’s what she wants. But she’s taking time now, to figure out what it is she wants. It doesn’t feel like all or nothing anymore. 

 

“Roman makes an excellent turkey.” Blair says lightly, taking her bag from Nate. “If either of you need a change of scenery in November.”

 

Humphrey clucks his tongue, scratching at the back of his neck, but Nate’s already accepting for both of them. 

 

Blair leaves. 

 

For the first time in a long time, it doesn’t feel like running away. 


End file.
